One new weblog every 11 seconds!

From Dave Sifri, the guy who founded Technorati.

“Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds. ”

A red-letter day?

This is the day that we finally got broadband at home. Given that we live in a village and British Telecom once poo-poohed the idea that we would ever get ADSL, it seems like a minor miracle. I’ve been accustomed to T1 lines at work for years, but had to put up with the 56k trickle at home. Bliss…

Forty years on

JFK was shot dead forty years ago today. Media are full of it. First thing I heard upon waking was John Connolly’s window remembering the ghastly moment when the President and her husband were struck, followed by an interview on BBC Radio 4 with Robert Macnamara, JFK’s slickly-haired Secretary of Defense. I am old enough to remember vividly where I was the moment it happened. I was in my bedroom, sitting at a sloping desk my parents had bought in an auction, doing my homework. Nothing special in that. But there was an edge to my feelings, because I had actually seen the President, in the flesh, close-to, a few months earlier, on his visit to Ireland. Years later, I wrote about it.

Keynes on English church music

I’m reading the third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s wonderful biography of John Maynard Keynes. Here’s an extract from a letter Keynes wrote to his doctor, Janos Plesch, inviting him to a chapel service in King’s College chapel:

“You would hear English church music in its most exquisite form and in the grandest possible environment. To my thinking, though exquisite, it is lifeless and even moribund… But if you have never been to one of these highly respectable, quasi-aesthetic Victorian performances, where deathly moderation and pseudo-good taste have drowned all genuine emotions, you might find it an interesting experience”.

The depressing economics of spam

The Register reports that spammers can make a good living with a response rate of 50 in a million recipients. Eh? This is based on a paper by Andrew Leung who works for a Canadian telco.

More on RFID

Might need a separate Blog for this in due course. MIT Technology Review says: “The Chicago Sun Times reports that P&G and Wal-Mart did a secret test of RFID chips in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers were equipped with RFID chips. “The shelves and Webcam images were viewed 750 miles away by Procter & Gamble researchers in Cincinnati who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and could even watch consumers in action,” the article says.

This latest report “proves what we’ve been saying all along,” says Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN). “Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and others have experimented on shoppers with controversial spy chip technology and tried to cover it up,” Albrecht says. “Consumers and members of the press should be upset to learn that they’ve been lied to.”

Would software diversity be any more secure than the Microsoft monoculture?

Interesting article by Pete Lindstrom criticising the paper Cyber-insecurity — the cost of monopoly by Dan Geer, Bruce Schneier, Becky Bace and other security experts which argued that the dominance of Microsoft made the world unnecessarily insecure.

Surgical examination of Steve Ballmer’s claim that Linux is more insecure than Windows

Why people take Steve Ballmer seriously is a mystery, given that he talks more hooey than any other living Chief Executive. But recently he resumed ranting about the ‘security’ of Microsoft products relative to Open Source software. Thanks to Groklaw for this interesting rebuttal.

Computer viruses are 20 years old this week

Well, according to BBC Online they are anyway. Quote:

“US student Fred Cohen was behind the first documented virus that was created as an experiment in computer security.

Now there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.

Virus writers have adapted to new technology as it has emerged and the most virulent programs use the net to find new victims and cause havoc. Mr Cohen created his first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California.

Others had written about the potential for creating pernicious programs but Mr Cohen was the first to demonstrate a working example.

In the paper describing his work he defined a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself”.

Mr Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD that was written for a make of mini-computer called a Vax.”

Gosh! I used to use a VAX. Which reminds me, did I ever tell you what I did in the Boer War…?.

Things to do when the boss is away

http://www.statusq.org/gems/things2.mpg

(thanks to Quentin for this. I missed it first time around).